The Fight for the Heart of the Southern Baptist Convention

As numerous post over a period of years have noted, the Southern Baptist Convention ("SBC") has a huge sex abuse problem that the SBC leadership - much like the Vatican under Pope John Paul II - has sought to cover up and in the process has further abused and slandered victims of abuse by SBC pastors.  But the SBC has another major problem which may well decide the long term future of the Convention: open racism.  (A third problem is the Convention leadership's virulent homophobia which is the topic of a future post).  In the 1970's arch reactionaries gained control of the SBC leadership and some churches - e.g., the Baptist church my late in-laws attended - opted to leave the SBC.  Over the intervening years, churches that opted to be LGBT welcoming were thrown out of the Convention.  But the racial issue always simmered under the surface until it exploded into the open by the SBC leadership's embrace of Donald Trump and his open white nationalism.  With a new president of the SBC to be elected (reactionary candidate Albert Mohler is pictured above), many pastors of color - I suspect many younger Baptists - are preparing to leave if  one of the reactionary candidates is elected.  This exodus would be on top of historic loses in members in 2020.  A piece in the New Yorker looks at the growing divide over race within the denomination that arose out of the goal of supporting slavery.  Here are highlights:

In a recent Friday afternoon, Dwight McKissic sat at a folding table in his three-car garage, on a cul-de-sac in Arlington, Texas, discussing the role that race plays in a growing divide among American evangelicals. McKissic is sixty-four, with a trim white goatee and an imposing stature. For the past thirty-eight years, he has served as the lead pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church, which he grew from a few dozen people to roughly four thousand congregants. In the process, he has become a prominent member of the Southern Baptist Convention, which, with more than fourteen million members, is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. But McKissic is also one of a growing number of pastors of color who may leave the S.B.C. next week, amid allegations that the organization won’t collectively acknowledge the realities of systemic racism. “I’m hanging on by a thread,” he told me. “Dozens of other pastors have already called me to ask what I’m going to do.”

McKissic thought that it would be hard for an outsider to understand why he’d joined the S.B.C., which has a long and painful history around race. But he’d also seen the organization do a lot of good. He was raised in a Black Baptist church, and, when he started Cornerstone, in 1983, the S.B.C. had helped out with funding.

Until recently, much of the racism that he’d encountered in the S.B.C. was “passive,” McKissic said. But after the election of Donald Trump, in 2016, he felt that the racist rhetoric became more overt. McKissic was also unsettled by what he saw as a growing antipathy toward allowing women to serve in leadership roles in the church. The tensions came to a head over the teachings of critical race theory, a loose set of academic tools used to identify systemic racism. C.R.T. emerged in legal scholarship in the seventies, as a method of examining how the law perpetuates racial injustice. Recently, though, it has become a kind of bogeyman for the right: last year, Trump tweeted that critical race theory was “a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue. Please report any sightings so we can quickly extinguish!” His Administration also issued a memo ordering federal anti-racism training programs to stop using the theory.

For the past few years, prominent members of the S.B.C., including Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the denomination’s oldest academic institution, have demonized C.R.T., calling it, among other things, Marxist and anti-Biblical. Critics have frightened S.B.C. members with the prospect that the theory could soon be used in public schools to indoctrinate children against conservative values.

Throughout 2020, state chapters passed resolutions rejecting critical race theory. Then, last November, on the heels of the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd, the presidents of S.B.C.’s six seminaries issued an incendiary statement calling C.R.T. “incompatible with the Baptist Faith & Message.” This outraged many pastors of color; none had suggested applying the teachings of C.R.T to the church, but they felt that its blanket rejection was being used by white leaders to dismiss the realities of racism.

In Texas, McKissic read the statement with dismay. “It’s putting lipstick on racism,” he told me. As he saw it, the fight over C.R.T. was also the fight for the future of the S.B.C. A cabal of reactionary, aging white men was trying to maintain control of the organization, and, in order to hold on to power, those men were stoking people’s fears of creeping liberalism. (A spokesperson for the S.B.C. said that it was a sprawling organization whose members held a wide range of viewpoints.) In January, 2021, McKissic wrote an article titled “We Are Getting Off The Bus,” denouncing the rejection of C.R.T. in the November statement and explaining that he was leaving a Texas chapter of the S.B.C. “I am not willing to allow them to dictate what the belief systems, definitions and authoritative binding, academic and ecclesiastical decisions [are] regarding how race is to be communicated in the local church,” he wrote.

On Twitter, the backlash to McKissic’s announcement was severe. Several days after he spoke out, he received a letter in the mail from a former S.B.C. member named John Rutledge, saying that Black people had “invaded the church” and that the issues were “beyond the Negroes’ intellectual capacities.” The letter said, of Black people, “Like two-year-olds, they know only how to whine and throw tantrums. The SBC should bid them goodbye and good riddance!”

Next week, at the group’s 2021 conference, in Nashville, its members will vote on the Convention’s next president. The choice likely lies between the three most viable candidates. One candidate is Mohler, the seminary president who was the face of the charge against C.R.T. He told me recently that C.R.T. goes against “both Christianity and modern political, classical liberty.” Another contender is Mike Stone, a pastor from South Georgia who is even more conservative than Mohler; when we spoke, he called C.R.T. a “weapon of division.” The third is Ed Litton, a soft-spoken pastor who has been involved in racial-reconciliation efforts in Mobile, Alabama, and who believes that the fight over C.R.T. has become a way to avoid talking about the need for structural change in the Southern Baptist Convention.

If either of the two hard-liners wins, McKissic will leave the S.B.C. “The trajectory of the S.B.C. will have proved to be anti-woman, and hostile to race in a way that can’t be justified by the Bible,” he said. “I just can’t, in good conscience, remain a part of a fellowship like that.”

The Southern Baptist Convention was founded, in 1845, to safeguard the institution of slavery. Northern Baptists had recently ruled that men who owned slaves were no longer permitted to serve as missionaries, and slaveholding Baptists decided to form their own group in protest. Founders of the new organization claimed that, according to the Bible, slavery was “an institution of heaven.” . . . . In 1863, the Southern Baptists pledged to support the Confederacy in the Civil War. According to a 2018 report put out by the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, on the role that slavery played within the organization, one early leader believed that “slavery was no mere necessary evil, but rather a God-ordained institution to be perpetuated.”

In the twentieth century, the S.B.C. went through a period of relative opening, allowing for wide-ranging readings of scripture and letting its academic institutions flourish. . . . But, in the late seventies, there was a backlash within the organization that came to be known as the conservative resurgence. Hard-liners took over the S.B.C., and, in the name of returning it to the teachings of the Bible, pushed back on several social issues. They fought efforts to diversify the leadership and pressed for stricter scriptural interpretations, arguing, for example, that women must submit to the will of men.

After Trump’s election, these divisions intensified. Some Convention members were shocked at what they saw as Trump’s openly xenophobic, racist, and sexist rhetoric, but those who criticized him faced swift backlash.

For many pastors of color, the Southern Baptist Convention’s future rests on what happens during the election in Nashville. Some have already begun to leave. Onwuchekwa, the pastor in Atlanta, was among the first to go. Soon after the death of George Floyd, he gathered about two hundred members of his congregation on Zoom to vote on abandoning the S.B.C. . . . leaving was a principled decision: How could they represent an entity that was increasingly hostile to the needs they were addressing on the street? “The S.B.C. is going backwards,” he said. Voting by Zoom poll, ninety-seven per cent of his congregation decided that the church should leave the Convention.

In December, several more prominent pastors of color followed suit, including Charlie Dates, of Chicago’s Progressive Baptist Church, and Ralph West, who leads the Church Without Walls, a church with nine thousand members in Houston, Texas. West, like others, grew troubled by the aggressive tone that the S.B.C. adopted while Trump was in office. “With their invective and rhetoric, they were providing theological cover for the extreme right,” he said.

I would be highly shocked if the moderate Litton gets elected.  Unless this happens, expect the SBC to become even more supportive of white nationalism and more active in dissemination lies and hate.  If this happens, with luck, the exodus of blacks and younger members will become a stampede.